Last Friday I attended the GOLD/GALILEO Annual Users Group Conference (photos here).
The conference opened with keynote speaker Diane Kresh, Director of the Arlington County Libraries. She was a powerful speaker, and explained many of the values that are driving users in our new information landscape. She explained the role that libraries need to play in terms of Content, Context and Community (as she said, she loves alliteration). I was very pleased to see her continually emphasize a user-centric approach to library services.
In the first breakout session, I presented Library 2.0.1: It’s All About the User. This presentation was geared towards the basics of the Library 2.0 idea, and helped to explain how it evolved from the Web 2.0 concept. Also, I showcased some of the social networking tools that libraries are using to get in touch with their users. As usual, I did a lot of meandering, made a few cheezy jokes, and got asked some great questions by a very inviting crowd of librarians.
For the second session I attended “Library 2.0.5: It’s All About the Input.” Three presenters discussed different ways in which they were getting user feedback, and using it to improve services. Jasmine de Gaia from OCLC is the Senior Project Manager for Social Networking initiatives. She talked about the ways that WorldCat.org is including social networking tools, and what to expect in the future. Currently they allow the creation of lists (only for items in WorldCat–not the un-cataloged Web), and hope to include more social connections between users in the near future. Next, Debbie Holmes discussed the development of tutorials for GALILEO at a system-wide level. This is a University System of Georgia initiative to improve the information literacy tools available for all users. Last, Mike Rylander showed some of the cutting-edge stuff that is going on with PINES/Evergreen, the open source ILS for the Georgia Public Library Service. I was very impressed with the way that they are letting users dictate their own information finding behavior, and then enhancing the catalog to reflect that use (and just not making tools and forcing users to jump through hoops to use them).
For the last session, I presented Library 2.1: It’s All About the Future. Since the library world is changing so quickly, it doesn’t hurt to look ahead to possible changes we may see in the years to come. Looking at the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) and Web4 (Web 4.0), I discussed the possible implication for librarians and library users. Again, the crowd was awesome, asked some tough questions, and put up with my attempts at humor (“We must CONTROL the vocabulary! CONTROL IT! You! User! You can ONLY use THESE WORDS! Of course these words don’t make sense! That’s the point!”).
All around it was an excellent conference. I met some very cool librarians, got to hang out with friends from across the state, and learned about some new developments in Library 2.0. Plus, I finally got to eat at The Grit!
